Disrupting the Racial Wealth Gap

Racial Wealth Disparities : Is the Gap Closing ?

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the session "Ethnicity, Race and Socioeconomic Outcomes" at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Los Angeles, CA, March 23-25, 2000 and at the conference on "Saving, Intergenerational Transfers and the Distribution of Wealth" at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, June 7-9, 2000. We thank Maureen Conway, R...

“’Twice as Hard for Half as Much’: Wealth Privilege and the Racial Wealth Gap”

Those who study the racial wealth gap are in a bind. Although the Life Cycle Hypothesis (LCH) serves as an effective framework to understand the wealth gap, it is itself incapable of explaining a key question: why the racial wealth gap is so much larger than the racial income gap. This paper introduces the Wealth Privilege (WP) model as an alternative vehicle to ground future analysis. Unlike t...

Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?

Despite an enormous and persistent black-white wealth gap, the ascendant American narrative is one that proclaims that our society has transcended the racial divide. The proclamation often is coupled with the claim that remaining disparities are due primarily to dysfunctional behavior on the part of blacks. In such a climate it appears the only acceptable remedial social policies are those that...

The Political Economy of Education, Financial Literacy, and the Racial Wealth Gap

Much of the framing around wealth disparity, including the use of alternative financial service products, focuses on the poor financial choices and decisionmaking on the part of largely Black, Latino, and poor borrowers, which is often tied to a culture of poverty thesis regarding an undervaluing and low acquisition of education. This framing is wrong—the directional emphasis is wrong. It is mo...

Examining the gender wealth gap